Overview

The Role and Team

We are growing our GovCloud team and looking for a Staff Site Reliability Engineer to help scale how we operate Medallia's US public-sector cloud platform. You will support federal agencies and other regulated customers in a highly available, secure, and compliant environment built on AWS GovCloud and Kubernetes.

This is a hybrid role based near Tysons, Virginia, with regular in-office collaboration and remote flexibility. As a Staff Engineer, you will provide technical leadership - improving how we run the platform, mentoring teammates, and driving reliability improvements across teams - while still being hands-on in production.

Success in this role means delivering change safely in a regulated environment: strong automation, clear documentation, disciplined operations, and calm incident response under pressure.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate highly available, secure cloud infrastructure on AWS, including networking, identity/access management, Kubernetes clusters, DNS, certificates, and shared platform services.
• Design and operate AWS cloud networking end-to-end - VPC architecture, subnetting and routing, security groups/NACLs, VPC endpoints/PrivateLink, Transit Gateway, load balancing, and DNS - for secure, segmented, highly available connectivity.
• Operate and tune production PostgreSQL - high availability and replication, backups and recovery, query and performance optimization, version upgrades, and capacity planning - as part of the platform's data tier.
• Ensure the reliability and availability of Medallia applications and infrastructure by monitoring systems, responding to incidents, and eliminating recurring operational problems.
• Develop and maintain Infrastructure-as-Code (primarily Terraform) and Kubernetes deployment workflows using Git, CI/CD, and modern GitOps practices.
• Improve observability across metrics, logs, and uptime monitoring; tune alerting to reduce noise and speed up diagnosis.
• Partner with software engineering, security, release management, and customer-facing teams to deploy changes safely, resolve production issues, and improve operability.
• Lead or contribute to platform upgrades, security patching, and compliance-driven maintenance in a regulated cloud environment.
• Participate in an on-call rotation and help improve incident response, communication, and post-incident follow-through.
• Document systems and operational procedures clearly so others can run and improve the platform.
• Use AI-assisted tooling responsibly, with attention to security, privacy, and customer data boundaries.
• Mentor engineers and help raise engineering standards as the GovCloud platform and team grow.

Candidates based in the Tysons vicinity will be prioritized as this role is Hybrid, 3 days per week onsite.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications

• Must reside in the United States and be legally authorized to work in the US without sponsorship.
• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience in Computer Science or a related field.
• 8+ years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering, platform engineering, DevOps, or related production infrastructure roles - or 5+ years with demonstrated Staff-level scope (technical leadership, cross-team delivery, incident ownership, and platform/IaC ownership).
• Production experience with:
  • Kubernetes
  • AWS core services (IAM, compute, object storage, encryption/key management) and AWS cloud networking (VPC design, routing, security groups, load balancing, VPC endpoints/PrivateLink, Transit Gateway, DNS)
  • Terraform or comparable infrastructure-as-code tools
  • Git and CI/CD pipelines
  • Linux and foundational systems concepts (networking, DNS, TLS/certificates)
  • PostgreSQL (or comparable relational databases) in production - replication, backups, and performance tuning
• Programming and Automation: Proficiency in Python and/or Go experience to build automation scripts, operational tooling, and infrastructure services.
• Incident & Change Management: Experience troubleshooting production incidents, conducting root-cause analysis(RCA), and following change management processes.
• Experience participating in a production on-call rotation.
• Experience troubleshooting complex technical issues and writing clear documentation, runbooks and incident post-mortems.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience operating in FedRAMP, AWS GovCloud, or other regulated or compliance-heavy cloud environments.
• Familiarity with security and compliance practices such as FIPS, vulnerability management, and controlled production change processes.
• Experience with observability and logging platforms in enterprise production environments.
• Deep operational expertise with PostgreSQL (HA/replication, tuning, backup and recovery); familiarity with data/platform technologies such as Redis and Kafka.
• Experience supporting federal agencies or public-sector customers.
• Exposure to government networking and security requirements.
• Experience with tools such as Jenkins, Argo CD, and GitHub Enterprise.
• Excellent collaboration skills and a strong willingness to learn.

Medallia is committed to equal pay and transparency. The annual base salary range for this position is $158,500 - $230,000. Please note that the salary range information provided is a general guideline and combines all of the distinct labor markets within the US. It is uncommon for an individual to be hired at or near the top of the range for their role and compensation decisions are dependent on a variety of factors. Medallia considers factors such as (but not limited to) scope and responsibilities of the position, candidate's work experience, candidate's work location, education/training, key skills, internal peer equity, external market data, as well as, market and business considerations when making compensation decisions.

Medallia also offers competitive health and wellness benefits, including but not limited to medical, dental, vision, 401(k), short-term and long-term disability, life and AD&D insurance, statutory leaves, paid parental leave, and paid holidays. Benefits and eligibility may vary by location and role.

At Medallia, we celebrate diversity and recognize the value it brings to our customers and employees.